Poets have long drawn inspiration from visual art, and more recently, film. These poems are inspired by, connect to, and create new relationships with film and cinematography, and include topics such as Valley of the Dolls, Izo, Chaplin, James Bond, Gone With the Wind, & Pierrot Le Fou.

I went to seeHow the West Was Won at the Sunshine Theater. Five years old, deep in a plush seat, light turned off, bright screen lit up with MGM roaring lion- in front of me a drunk Indian rose, cursed the western violins and hurled his uncapped bagged bottle of wine at the rocket roaring to the moon. His dark angry body convulsed with his obscene gestures at the screen, and then ushers escorted him up the aisle, and as he staggered past me, I heard his grieving sobs. Red wine streaked blue sky and take-off smoke, sizzled cowboys’ campfires, dripped down barbwire,

slogged the brave, daring scouts who galloped off to mesa buttes to speak peace with Apaches, and made the prairie lush with wine streams. When the movie was over, I squinted at the bright sunny street outside, looking for the main character.

The black kitten cries at her bowl meek meek and the gray one glowers from the windowsill. My hand on the can to serve them. First day of spring. Yesterday I drove my little mother for hours through wet snow. Her eightieth birthday. What she wanted was that ride with me— shopping, gossiping, mulling old grievances, 1930, 1958, 1970. How cruel the world has been to her, how uncanny she’s survived it. In her bag, a birthday card from “my Nemesis,” signed Sincerely with love—“Why is she doing this to me?” she demands, “She hates me.” “Maybe she loves you” is and isn’t what Mother wants to hear, maybe after sixty years the connection might as well be love. Might well be love, I don’t say— I won’t spoil her birthday, my implacable mother. In Byfield, in the snowstorm, we bought things at an antiques mall, she a miniature Sunbonnet Baby creamer and saucer— a bargain!—I, a chrome ice bucket stamped with penguins, with Bakelite handles. I wanted it, I had one just like it at home. Sometimes I think the only thing I’m sure I want is what I have.

“What do you wish for?” I asked a friend, I was so curious to know how he’d formulate a wish, to know if there is a formula. His list was deliciously simple, my friend the hedonist: a penthouse with a concierge, “wonderful food,” months in Mexico, good movies . . . .

Last night, you and I watched “The Way We Were” and I cried— I always do—for the wanting in it, and the losing. “It’s a great movie,” I said, to justify my tears. I wish you were more like me. Streisand and Redford, so opposite it’s emblematic, almost a cliché. Each wants or needs the other to change, so the pushy Jewish lefty, Barbara, should be quiet, accommodating, and the accommodating, handsome, laid-back “nice gentile boy” should agree with her that people are their principles. He thinks people can relax a little, be happy. If only they could both become nothing, they can stay together.

All her wishing and wanting and needing won’t make that happen. She marches against the Nazis, the Blacklist, the bomb, through the movie decades, and he doesn’t want to be a great unpopular novelist, so he writes badly for movies, and later, television. At the end (it’s the early ’60s), when they meet again in front of the Plaza, his look—the blank Redford quizzicality I’ve learned is his whole expressive repertoire— seems to ask, “Why? Why did I love you? Why do I still? Why aren’t you like me?” And because the director’s a liberal, Streisand’s the wiser one, more human than Redford—she’s leafletting, to ban the bomb, in the ’70s she’ll be Another Mother for Peace—the way she wriggles her sensual mouth (a mannerism that’s become familiar in the years since this movie was new) I know she loves him or at least yearns for him, still wants him, which is more piercing, more selfish. This morning, my throat is constricted, my head aches, I’m always like this, this movie reminds me you don’t get what you want, even if you’re not weak, or mean, or criminal. I wish I didn’t believe that message so utterly. Today I need to believe something more useful, more positive. Once, when I was a child, my mother lied to me. Maybe that day I was too demanding, more likely I needed consolation—my schoolmates so lucky, so confident, so gentile. Either she meant to reassure me, or—more likely— to instruct when she said (she couldn’t have believed it, the ’40s had happened) that the meek inherit the earth. That was lesson one of our course in resignation. My little mother, little kitten, be patient, I’m trying, it’s for you I’m opening this can of worms, for you I’m opening this can of food.

Great moment in Blade Runner where Roy Batty is expiring, and talks about how everything he’s seen will die with him — ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, sea-beams glittering before the Tannhauser Gates.

Memory is like molten gold burning its way through the skin it stops there. There is no transfer. Nothing I have seen will be remembered beyond me. That merciful cleaning of the windows of creation will be an excellent thing my interests notwithstanding.

He’s coming: The blood on the wall is the crisis is the contradiction in the system is the severed head on the floor is the group of butterflies flying towards the moon is the promised flower, blooming is the pistol on the table.

A man can honestly believe in God without believing in the Devil, can believe in the Devil without believing in God, and can admit the demonic without believing in either one.

I will still be sad: The beheading is the service of justice is the imperfection born out of perfection is the system born out of imperfection is the falling of the gavel is the blood dropping from the little girl’s hand is the row of severed heads, neatly in a row, smelling already like expired Halloween pumpkins putrefying in the sun.

A man is coming with malice in his heart. He has form but is formless. He has a soul but is soulless.

Since it denies being, the demonic spirit must borrow a being other than its own; being itself only pure negation, it needs another existence in order to exercise its negation.

This is crisis control. This is the Doctor of Interfering With Everything in the Universe. This is the infinite hell, the Mobius strip of violence. Can a human be so cruel as this?

Where is he going and what will he do there? To a meaningless place, to find meaning.

Punish them: The falling between planes is the upside down camera is the beheading of an ignorant groom is the uncertainty of feeling is the coexistence of the demon and the individual being is the abandonment of something is the insufficiency of being is the propulsion towards violence is the monk, split in half at a diagonal, the splitting sound of flesh sliding off of flesh, slowly, intentionally, mercilessly, arbitrarily, needlessly, necessarily.

About myself, I’m not sure how I’m feeling. But the constantly ajar mouth signifies something. You are eating, keeping your eyes wide open. You are enjoying the food. I am suffering. I never knew it would be so painful to die.

This will to seriousness and profundity reveals a powerlessness to experience the serious and the profound.

What is the point?

To succumb to the Devil is to succumb to deception.

You’ll be dead: The demon wandering in the darkness is me is you is the sword that is the soul or the soul that is the sword of doom is a blade thrust into the flesh is the cruelty of humanity is the spectacle of life is the hand crawling back into the body is the throat, raw and sore from the screaming, singing, praying, punishing.

We can have our pick of seats. Though the movie's already moving, the theater's almost an empty shell. All we can see on our side of the room is one man and one woman— as neat, respectable, and distinct as the empty chairs that come between them. But distinctions do not surprise, fresh as we are from sullen street and subway where lonelinesses crowded about us like unquiet memories that may have loved us once or known our love. Here we are an accidental fellowship, sheltering from the city's obscure bereavements to face a screened, imaginary living, as if it were a destination we were moving toward. Leaning to our right and suspended before us is a bored, smartly uniformed usherette. Staring beyond her lighted corner, she finds a reverie that moves through and beyond the shine of the silver screening. But we can see what she will never see— that she's the star of Hopper's scene. For the artist she's a play of light, and a play of light is all about her. Whether the future she is dreaming is the future she will have we have no way of knowing. Whatever it will prove to be it has already been. The usherette Hopper saw might now be seventy, hunched before a Hitachi in an old home or a home for the old. She might be dreaming now a New York movie, Fred Astaire dancing and kissing Ginger Rogers, who high kicks across New York City skylines, raising possibilities that time has served to lower. We are watching the usherette, and the subtle shadows her boredom makes across her not-quite- impassive face beneath the three red-shaded lamps and beside the stairs that lead, somehow, to dark streets that go on and on and on. But we are no safer here than she. Despite the semblance of luxury— gilt edges, red plush, and patterned carpet—this is no palace, and we do not reign here, except in dreams. This picture tells us much about various textures of lighted air, but at the center Hopper has placed a slab of darkness and an empty chair.

We make our meek adjustments, Contented with such random consolations As the wind deposits In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find A famished kitten on the step, and know Recesses for it from the fury of the street, Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us, Facing the dull squint with what innocence And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane; Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise. We can evade you, and all else but the heart: What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen The moon in lonely alleys make A grail of laughter of an empty ash can, And through all sound of gaiety and quest Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Across the room behind the mirrorhe slips a quarter in the slot.She can’t see him, doesn’t want to, isn’t interestedin being touched.How are you? she says; it’s whatshe always says: safe and friendly, not reallya question. What would you like to talk about?He doesn’t answer, which isn’t rare, notunheard of, just dumb.He drops a quarter in the slot.She wraps a finger in a strand of hair.My sister died of fever, she says, it’s whatshe always says, it sounds personal, likeshe means it. My mother healed herselfby baking bread for eight days straight,until the racks of loaves reached the kitchen ceiling.He drops a quarter in the slot.She has a bruisethe size of a knuckle below her collarboneand she shows him, which she sometimes does,though not often. Her husband pushed her thereon his way to work everydayon his way to poker, on his way to bed.He’s been gone six years, she says, but it won’t go away.It’s like a botched tattoo, a smudge of blue ink.He says something, he says, A tattoo is like a marriage.He taps the mirror with a coin.She says, How long were you married?She says, SometimesI can hear the river from my bedroom window.Sometimes it’s the sea. But I know it’s just the highway,just traffic passing through.He drops a quarter in the slot.She starts to say something else, how she’s been to Hawaii.She hears the door open, close.

On a screen as wide as this, I grope for the titles. I speak the French language like a schoolgirl of the ‘forties. Those roads remind me of Beauce and the motorcycle. We rode from Paris to Chartres in the March wind. He said we should go to Spain but the wind defeated me. France of the superhighways, I never knew you. How much the body took in those days, and could take! A naked lightbulb still simmers in my eyeballs. In every hotel, I lived on the top floor.

3.

Suppose we had time and no money living by our wits

telling stories

which stories would you tell?

I would tell the story of Pierrot Le Fou who trusted

not a woman

but love itself

till his head blew off not quite intentionally

I would tell all the stories I knew in which people went wrong but the nervous system

was right all along

4.

The island blistered at our feet. At first we mispronounced each others’ names. All the leaves of the tree were scribbled with words. There was a language there but no-one to speak it. Sometimes each of us was alone. At noon on the beach our shadows left us. The net we twisted from memory kept on breaking. The damaged canoe lay on the beach like a dead animal. You started keeping a journal on a coconut shell.